Mark McGuire's personal blog. Dunedin, New Zealand.

Saving our digitized past

I heard an interesting story in the 25 May 2010 podcast that was published by PRI’s The World. The episode, titled “Digital genome goes underground“, reports on a project funded by the EU to preserve our digital heritage, or at least some of it. This, according to reporter Clark Boyd, involves the production of a time capsule with five artifacts in digital formats that are in common use today – JPEG, QuickTime, PDF, HTML, and Java. The capsule, which includes information about how to recreate the hardware and software necessary to read the files, was locked into a vault in the Swiss Fort Knox. I looked up the website for the podcast and followed some of the links.

A visit to the Computer History Museum reminds us that technologies that were considered state of the art when they were first introduced were useful for a brief period, after which are treasured purely for their nostalgic value and become another historical artifact.

Thanks for this, Marina. I laughed out loud. As he says, we now have incredible technologies and we still complain when they occasionally fail us, or if there is a momentary delay. We are getting used to getting everything immediately (and for free, hopefully).
Mark